International sports federations as lawmakers: Queer-feminist explorations of sports law
Lena Holzer is an Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and the Law in the Law Faculty at the University of Cambridge and serves as Sheila Lesley Fellow at Girton College. Her research focuses on critical feminist, queer and intersectional approaches to international law with a focus on human rights law and sports law. Prior to joining the University of Cambridge, she worked as a Lecturer in Law at Goldsmiths, University of London, and as Academic Supervisor at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She obtained her PhD in International Law, with a minor degree in International Relations, from the Geneva Graduate Institute and has acted as consultant for several European human rights NGOs aside her academic work. She is currently working on a book project tracing how international law has played a role in making binary gender categories part of people’s individual legal identity. Another project of hers examines the gendered and racialised nature of international sports regulations and global inequalities in the governance of sports.
Her PhD thesis titled "The Gender Binary in International Law" has been awarded with the 2022 SNIS Award and the 2023 Prix Senior Maurice Chalumeau.
About the Event
When we think of international lawmakers, we rarely consider of sport federations like FIFA or World Athletics. And yet, these federations hold significant normative power to regulate the lives and work of athletes as well as to shape global social relations, including gender relations. This has become evident in the reporting of recent mega-sporting events, such as the Paris Olympics and the 2022 FIFA (Men’s) World Cup, which precisely focused on the question which gender expressions are appropriate in sport competitions.
In this talk, I will follow up on these recent events by exploring the normative power of international sports federations to act as global regulators of gender norms. By analysing a few recent case studies, such as fines imposed on women athletes for violating uniform regulations and the Semenya case, I will show how sport governing bodies disseminate heterosexist norms shaped by White understandings of femininity across the world. Discussing the remedies that are available to challenge these norms will further reveal structural inequalities based on race and gender enshrined in the international sporting system. I thus conclude that it is high time for lawyers to take private bodies, such as sport federations, seriously and subject them to a queer-feminist and anti-racist critique. This approach will also help to deconstruct and overcome the binary divide between the public and the private, which has long been criticised as gendered.